Worlds of Exile and Illusion: Rocannon's World / Planet of Exile / City of Illusions (Hainish Cycle, #1-3)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

In the cacophony of sorting hats and color-coded Houses, A Wizard of Earthsea seemed drab, boring—and I mistook as derivative work that was foundational. It would be still further years before I revisited Earthsea and found treasure in it.

The people of the castle, blond lords and dark-haired servants,

and pain, since she was only a woman, made her weep.

or than Walden Pond itself.…’”

Thoreau?

Hope is a slighter, tougher thing even than trust, he thought, pacing his room as the soundless, vague lightning flashed overhead. In a good season one trusts life; in a bad season one only hopes. But they are of the same essence: they are the mind’s indispensable relationship with other minds, with the world, and with time. Without trust, a man lives, but not a human life; without hope, he dies. When there is no relationship, where hands do not touch, emotion atrophies in void and intelligence goes sterile and obsessed.

Against them he could never prevail except, perhaps, through the one quality no liar can cope with, integrity.

“You did not try to commit suicide last night,” the Shing said in his toneless whisper. That was in fact the one way out that had never occurred to Falk.

The name dropped like a stone into the dreamy tranquillity of his mind and vanished. Only the circles from it widened out and widened out softly, slowly, until at last the outermost circle touched shore, and broke.

The basic motor and sensory paths had never been blocked off and so in a sense had been shared all along, though difficulties arose there caused by the doubling of the sets of motor habits and modes of perception. An object looked different to him depending on whether he looked at it as Falk or as Ramarren, and though in the long run this reduplication might prove an augmentation of his intelligence and perceptive power, at the moment it was confusing to the point of vertigo.

Yet even in his bewilderment there was the germ of interaction, of the coherence toward which he strove. For the fact remained, he was, bodily and chronologically, one man: his problem was not really that of creating a unity, only of comprehending it.

Seen rightly, any situation, even a chaos or a trap, would come clear and lead of itself to its one proper outcome; for there is in the long run no disharmony, only misunderstanding, no chance or mischance but only the ignorant eye.